Blade servers (or blade PCs) represent a fast growing segment in the computing industry because of the compaction, consolidation, modularity, management, and maintenance afforded by the blade servers. The growth in the use of blade servers has, however, led to ever increasing challenges in efficiently powering and cooling the blade servers. The challenges include attempts at minimizing the relatively high operational capital and recurring costs associated with enterprise environments having a relatively large number of blade servers.
It is often beneficial to monitor the power consumption levels of the blade servers to thereby track the costs associated with operating the blade servers. The power consumption levels of the blade servers are typically monitored through the use of hardware, such as, current monitors. The use of conventional hardware to monitor blade server energy usage is typically results in relatively high costs. In addition, it is often relatively difficult to integrate conventional energy monitoring hardware with legacy systems.
The ability to monitor power consumption levels of blade servers as well as other electronic devices, such that the costs and difficulties associated with monitoring the power consumptions levels are substantially minimized, would therefore be beneficial.